NETC North East Transit Circuit

Post-annexation, the removal of the borders would empower strategic projects such as this:

A maglev (or HST) circuit between Toronto, Montreal, New York & Washington? Wouldn't that be a major league game changer to energize and immediately transform the dynamic in our industrial heartland? Demonstrably, the cheapest link doesn't require Canadian participation. However, there's been a lot of interest to link Montreal with New York and Montreal with Toronto so who knows!

I feel if/when an annexation happen, a lot of North/South projects such as this (or keystone) may happen.

However, some of these projects could be happening right now on either side of the border (there's nothing stopping a HST to be built connecting Boston/New York/Washington right now, or Toronto/Montreal). I question if an annexation would get these projects off the ground, but maybe it's exactly what needs to happen to get it started!

I think the NY/Toronto link would be a no-brainer, given the importance of the finance industry in both cities. (Mind you, if it's run by Amtrak or Via Rail, or, heaven forbid, some sort of post-annexation love child of the two, it'll never run in the black.) And there's already a rail link from NY to Montreal. That said, high speed rail would be incredibly expensive in the northeast, since it has some of the lowest rail speed limits in the nation and would need to basically start from scratch to support high speed rail. But NY to Washington seems well served by the current connection, and there wouldn't be a huge need for a Toronto to Washington link, in my eyes. (The real annexation question is "What about Ottawa?" What will Ottawa do, or be famous for, post-annexation?)

You guys are right, I had some time to think about it and realized how off this is though as you say the idea is a new environment that favors such strategic initiatives in post-annexation situation. Maybe it should be a massive deep underground project involving truly revolutionary vacuum tube magnetic levitation so as to make it all really worthwhile lol

Obviously the links provided were not very realistic, and also aside from Ottawa (the role of Ottawa might be as a backup capital or secondary capital of America?) there is Boston that should be considered as well for inclusion. Perhaps there would be no physical public works project such as these, but the disappearance of the border and all the red tape would hopefully encourage growing trade and ties nonetheless.

I gave a regional example (and a bad one at that ahah) but as you mention that is certainly something that could and should happen in the rest of the expanded nation... we should have some grandiose project that links up all major cities with 500+kph vacuum underground tube maglevs lol

Alarms whistles going off that this is all "fictional material" talk, unless we somehow develop a new system of sovereign credit that empowers such massive undertakings.. Innovation I guess.. finding a way to make this cheap and easy with boring machines that can really hack through easy.. having one such link (as fantastically unrealistic as it may be) to the arctic region would really empower rapid growth and development of that region and the exploitation of the vast resources it contains!

^ And as a Quebecer I have to say: this transportation system works in any climate and that's a HUGE deal.. North American distances require North American solutions, we'll have to envision something bigger and better to fit our needs and requirements, but the core of the idea remains the same ultimately.

Good point, I had forgotten that winters get pretty harsh even as far south (relatively speaking) as Montreal. New York also tends to get shut down at least once a winter due to heavy snow. And Boston last winter… well, some things are better left unmentioned. So, some sort of underground system could conceivably offer a huge advantage there. The real question is cost. If this sort of transportation system costs less than the money lost by travel difficulties in winter, it will get built. Truthfully, I just have an issue with this sort of massive public works project, especially one intended primarily for national pride or ill-defined nation-building reasons. Annexation will lead to innovative projects between the US and Canada, regardless of what form they take. (But then, you could get the same end result from removing all the trade and economic barriers between the two countries, even without annexation.)

(We had a particularly cold, yet fairly dry winter here this past year, so winter wasn't really on my mind. Now, last year, we had over 4 feet of snow over the course of the winter. I know that's nothing to what you get out of lake effect snow, but it was a record setting winter for us.)

To get an idea of the scale of the project, a tunnel from New York to DC would be about 200 miles long. The entire New York City underground currently has about 140 miles of tunnel.

Assuming the tunneling itself could be paid for, the volume of material that would be needed for the support-structure in the tunnel would also be prohibitively expensive. Perhaps the tunnel could initially be designed as a sub-sonic line that also services several of the "connecting" cities, such as Baltimore?

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Another thought I had was you could build the prototype Maglev tunnel in a location and to a curvature where it could be dual-purposed as a launch-assist system. Instead of decelerating a train at the halfway point, you could have a vehicle that accelerates along the entire track, and shoots out through a membrane, which would then power itself the rest of the way to an orbital station. Perhaps connecting two major cities in Texas would be a better place to start, with an 'extender' track on the east side of the more eastern city, so the launch-site for the space vehicles isn't right in the middle of town?

Another thing that could be looked at so as to avoid this ever becoming a prestige project as opposed to a sound and useful one, would be to look at the opportunity of designing it primarily as a heavy industrial freight transport grid, with civilian transportation as an afterthought.. the heavy industrial capability would certainly provide the military with a rapid and dependable means of moving assets round for continental defense too!

Imagine a fleet of machines boring their way throughout the place, only way bigger than even this:

At this point is becomes a public works project that enables increased trade and commerce, the kind of thing that enables massive economic growth and can be a worthwhile investment (worth getting indebted over).